The smoke is thick enough to choke, and I
find myself too caught up in a coughing fit to hear the landing craft operator call
out thirty seconds to the beach. Overhead, American and British aircraft scream through
the sky, strafing a line of hardened concrete bunkers. High explosive shells from the assault
support group's big battleships and destroyers smash into the beach and the bunkers both. A
stretch of the French coast several miles long has been turned into hell on earth, fire, smoke,
and the screams of dying men filling the air. The landing crafts belch out thick plumes of
smoke, ideally obscuring the views of German gunners up on the higher slopes of the beach.
Unfortunately the prevailing wind is blowing most of the smoke back out to sea, and I'm pretty sure
all it's doing is making it hard to breathe for any of us steaming towards the shore. I can't tell
how far out we are, I don't dare peek my head up above the steel armored sides of my landing craft
and instead keep my gaze down. Typically LCVPs had sides made of nothing more than reinforced
wood paneling, but with the heavy opposition the first few waves would face, our landing craft
enjoyed the luxury of an inch of armor plating. I don't miss the second call from the operator
calling out fifteen seconds to the beach, but I still keep my head down- I won't so
much as look up until I feel the craft smash into the beach and hear the ramp splash
down. I try to ignore the swill of vomit and seawater swishing past my
ankles at the bottom of the boat, damn thing tosses up and down on each
wave and half the men are seasick. The other half puked out of fear and nerves. Suddenly the metallic pinging sound of
high caliber rounds finding their mark rings out all across the boat. We
all duck even lower inside the boat, but some of the men are too late and the
German gunner's position is too high- blood and other bodily fluids quickly join the
vomit-laced sea water at the bottom of the boat. And then the entire craft comes to
a sudden stop, and half of us get pitched forward and down into that
disgusting water. A second later, there's the distinct sound of the two hundred
pound ramp at the front hitting the ground. For a moment, I can't believe it- there's no
protection from that machine gun fire anymore, and we're supposed to just walk out
into it?! What kind of madness is this? But it doesn't matter, because staying on
the boat is guaranteed to get you killed. Terror pumps through my veins as I scramble
up onto my feet and push forward. Several of the men in front of me slump backwards and
I find myself screaming and cursing at them, demanding that they move already damn
it- but then I realize that they're dead. I'd be dead too if they hadn't been standing right
in front of me and shielded me with their bodies. There's no time to mourn, no time for shock. I
shove the corpses out of my way and half-crawl over them. I step on one of the dead men's
faces in my scramble to get out of the boat, shattering the glasses he still wears. I think
his name was Lewis, one of the older guys in our platoon. Home was somewhere in upstate New
York, just outside of the city. He'd volunteered before his draft notice came up, now he was a
corpse at the bottom of a landing craft with shattered glasses and a broken nose from me
climbing over him in my mad dash to safety. Men drop all around me as I stumble out of
the landing craft at last. I run forward at a mad dash, then realize what I'm doing and
hit the deck. A large iron tank obstacle- Czech Hedgehog as they're known in Eastern
Europe- is only a few feet in front of me. It's not much cover, but it's better
than nothing, and I start crawling. Some German gunner in a pill box in
front and above me must've spied my plan, because the moment I start crawling he opens up
all around me. I make it to the hedgehog though and take what little cover I can get behind
the twisted metal. Thankfully I'm just under the German's firing angle, and he can't quite
get at me. The sand all around me explodes from the machine gun fire though, and
high-speed sand blasts my body like shrapnel, stinging and cutting the exposed
flesh on my face, neck, and hands. Then, I hear a wooshing sound followed by a
dull 'thump', and the firing stops. I peer up cautiously and see the pillbox in flames, and off
to my right a man prepares to reload his bazooka and have a go at another German position. He never
gets a chance to, a sniper's bullet catches him right in the sternum and he drops. I can see
bloody bubbles erupting from the man's mouth as he gasps for air like a fish on dry land, and
I know that he's already dead- there's nothing anyone could do for him. Still, I'm grateful for
him- I'd probably be dead without his expert shot. It's another few long moments before I realize
that I'm supposed to be doing something. I'm not supposed to just be sitting here,
huddling behind this tank obstacle and watching the world go to hell all around me.
I'm supposed to be charging up that beach, taking the same bunkers spitting death at
hundreds of rounds a minute. For the second time in just a few short minutes it strikes
me just how utterly insane this all is. Just charge up the beach, into the teeth
of German machine guns, and take them out. Who came up with this plan? And who was
insane enough to go through with it? I hear loud whistling that tears me
out of my dazed trance. A fresh wave of landing craft have hit the shore and
more men are swarming up along the beach. A large black Army Sergeant is blowing a
whistle as he charges up the beach towards me. He doesn't even stop as he picks me up
by my uniform and drags me forward with him. “C'mon you son of a bitch, there
ain't no Germans to kill down here!” I'm staggering, trying to catch my balance, half
dragged by the muscle-bound Sergeant and half stumbling forward on my own power. Finally
he shoves me down as he himself takes cover behind a sand dune. The Sergeant scans the beach
behind him, taking in the corpses washing up from burning landing craft a hundred feet off shore,
as well as the dead men who's boats actually made it to the beach. Most took only a single
step onto French soil before buying the farm. I look around too, corpses behind us,
survivors huddling at the base of the first line of German defenses. I can't help but note
that there's a lot more of us dead than alive. The Sergeant looks... angry? No, frustrated.
As if this whole affair was nothing more than some great inconvenience, rather than a literal
bloodbath. He calls out to groups of men huddled under tank traps, behind sand dunes, and other
pieces of cover from the fierce German fire. I can't help but think that back home, most of
these white soldiers wouldn't have paid half a mind to the black Sergeant. But here, well, we
all bleed red- as has been made abundantly clear. I think the men are just glad to have
someone to follow; I'll admit it, as the Sergeant barks out orders
in preparation for our assault, even I'm relieved. Someone with a plan in all this
chaos... the Sergeant's confidence is contagious. “Alright, you dogs, Europe
ain't gonna save itself!” The men actually manage a battle
cry as they join the Sergeant in the assault. I'm astonished to hear
myself join the chorus of voices. Even more incredulous to be picking myself up
from behind the safety of a thick sand dune and rushing forward into a horizontal
rain of shrapnel and high velocity lead. There's nothing to do but run, run as fast as you
can and get under the line of fire of the German gunners. The same bunkers that keep them safe from
bombardment and gunfire will be our safety as well once we get to their bottom walls. There's
machine gun pillboxes between us and those first line of concrete bunkers, but thankfully
most of them have been completely devastated by our preparatory bombardments and air
strikes. The few that haven't been score massive casualties on our forces, but there's
more troops hitting the shore every minute, and the Germans are eventually overwhelmed.
Some simply run out of ammo, killing dozens, before being swarmed by men
swinging bayonets and rifle butts. Somehow the site of Germans being beaten
and stabbed to death is more terrible to me than any of the countless poor saps I've seen
getting cut down by those same machine gunners. There's something modern about a machine
gun- almost civilized. At least compared to the primordial screams and yells as men tear
the Germans to pieces with their bare hands. I don't even realize we've hit a mine field until
I've managed to run at least a hundred yards in. The roar of machine guns and explosions all around
me merges into a hellish cacophony of chaos, and I'm not even aware of the mines until I
catch sight of a man far to my left as he's suddenly cut down from below. Despite my system
being flooded with terror-fueled adrenaline, I feel a new shiver of fear race up my spine for
an instant, knowing every step could be my last. The Sergeant I've been following this
entire time looks over his shoulder at me, a knowing look on his face. He doesn't have
to say it aloud- the only way out is forward. I run, pumping my legs as hard as I can and
fighting against the damned sand for speed. There's even fewer of us than before when we
finally hit the bottom of a German bunker, and most of us collapse, gasping for breath.
I'm shocked to realize that we're only barely two hundred yards from the breaking waves-
I could swear I just ran halfway across France. The Sergeant's on us again immediately
though, picking men up on their feet by force if necessary. The man is a machine,
and I hate to say it, but he's right. There's no time to rest- specially not directly
under a heavily fortified German position. Their machine guns may not be able
to get us but- at that moment, several grenades explode along our line. I
can hear the distinct sound of more hitting the ground around us as I dive for cover.
We're directly under a firing slit, and the krauts inside are just tossing grenades onto
us from above. We're worse than sitting ducks. I don't know how many the grenades kill or injure,
all I know is that other than cuts and bruises, all my limbs are intact and I'm alive. I also know
that we can't stay here. I shove a man next to me forward and find myself screaming at him and
several others, “Move your asses, damn it!”. We have to keep going, we gotta work our way to the
rear of the bunkers and start clearing them out. The Germans have built their bunkers so that one
could support the other, but they weren't planning on the overwhelming numbers of landing craft
they'd be dealing with today. A massive human wave is breaking on these French shores, and staining
them red with unthinkable amounts of blood. We quickly move around the bunker, the men in
front of me gunning down two Germans rushing towards the same entrance we're moving to.
They were loaded down with machine gun belts, no doubt there to resupply the defenders. With the
sound of gunfire behind their position, the krauts inside would no doubt know we were coming- but
we wouldn't have to charge in there ourselves and straight into the waiting rifles and machine guns
of the Germans. First, we had a treat for them. The thought of burning another human alive is
deeply horrendous to me, but I am ashamed to admit that I'm glad to see one of the flame thrower
equipped men managed to make it up the beach. The thought of running into this barrage of
high-speed lead with an explosive tank on your back is utterly insane, but now I'm glad that
some S-O-B was brave- or stupid- enough to do it. The flamethrower makes a horrible swishing sound
as it fills the bunker with fire. In the tight confines, the flames reach into every corner, and
the air in the bunker heats up so hot that men's skin and clothes burst into flames even if they
managed to avoid a direct blast. I can hear the horrible screams of dying men over the sound
of machine gun rounds cooking off, and as the stench of burning human flesh reaches me, I find
myself retching for the second time this morning. I feel a firm grip on my shoulder and look
up into the face of the black Sergeant, giving me a slight nod. The
man looks grim, but determined, I can't help but admire him and his steely
resolve. He nods at me and the other survivors- eighteen of us out of at least a hundred
that made it off the first wave of boats. “Take a breather, wait for more to make it up
the beach and we hit the second line of bunkers.” I look behind me and down at the beach,
there's dead and dying everywhere, but scrambling for safety are dozens of
soldiers. Often they have to crawl over corpses to find a bit of safety in the
hailstorm of bullets that greets them, but the firing is less severe now. More men
are making it up the beach alive than before. Glancing down at the watch on my wrist my eyes
widen in amazement- it's only been thirteen minutes since the assault began. Here, in this
brief respite from the storm, it already feels like a lifetime ago. It's then that I realize
that I haven't even fired my rifle once yet. Now check out How I Survived Combat,
or click this other video instead!
